But isn't this just another local privilege escalation exploit? It's nothing new on linux, but it's still only local. The only special thing seems to be that it also affects ARM. This is nothing like heartbleed.

Linux bugs like this get all over the news because, being open source, you can't hide them like some other OSes I could mention ....

Bugs in cryptography can just sit there hiding in plain sight for years. There's some extremely advanced math there involving math theory. Even if it's open source there aren't many people out there who can understand it.

linux geeks need to hide in shame for awhile. so much bragging, now so much harm may come.

There's bugs in all OSes, some years ago it was discovered that someone had purposely added a backdoor to OpenBSD, widely considered the most secure OS, with only a small handful of exploits in over 15 years. the backdoor was discovered after a source code audit exposed it but it was so clever it was only a few lines of code that effectively left the whole OS exposed for those that new what to look for.

FreeBSD had an exploit that allowed hackers to hack the PS4; be that as it may *nixes are still way more secure than Windows has ever been. At least with open source OSes code auditors can find the flaw, one can only begin to imagine how many backdoors Win 10 has.

I'll put up a hardened Linux server against a hardened Windows server any day of the week.